The number of clinical specimens containing β-lactam-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates is increasing. However, whether resistance is associated with reduced fitness is still uncertain in clinical Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates. In this study, we aimed to determine whether β-lactam resistance conferred a fitness cost in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Growth rate, extracellular slime production...

We consider systems of n parallel edge dislocations in a single slip system, represented by points in a two-dimensional domain; the elastic medium is modelled as a continuum. We formulate the energy of this system in terms of the empirical measure of the dislocations, and prove several convergence results in the limit n → ∞. The main aim of the paper is to study the convergence of the evolution...

In this paper, the equilibrium behavior of an immiscible two phase fluid on a rough surface is studied from a phase field equation derived from minimizing the total free energy of the system. When the size of the roughness becomes small, we derive the effective boundary condition for the equation by the multiple scale expansion homogenization technique. The Wenzel and Cassie equations for the a...

A 3D-2D dimensional reduction analysis for supremal functionals is performed in the realm of Γ-convergence. We show that the limit functional still admits a supremal representation, and we provide a precise identification of its density in some particular cases. Our results rely on an abstract representation theorem for the Γ-limit of a family of supremal functionals. Mathematics Subject Classi...

This paper deals with the passage from discrete to continuous in modeling the static elastic properties, in the setting of anti-planar linear elasticity, of vertical screw dislocations in a cylindrical crystal. We study, in the framework of Γ-convergence, the asymptotic behavior of the elastic stored energy induced by dislocations as the atomic scale ε tends to zero, in the regime of dilute dis...

To determine whether the widespread clinical use of -lactams has been selective for Citrobacter freundiiderived alleles of plasmid ampC genes, we generated a Bayesian consensus phylogeny of the published ampC sequences and compared the MICs of 16 -lactam antibiotics for Escherichia coli strains containing cloned copies of the C. freundii ampC alleles. We found that for the majority of compounds...

We deal with a class of reaction-diffusion equations, in space dimension d > 1, perturbed by a Gaussian noise ∂wδ/∂t which is white in time and colored in space. We assume that the noise has a small correlation radius δ, so that it converges to the white noise ∂w/∂t, as δ ↓ 0. By using arguments of Γ-convergence, we prove that, under suitable assumptions, the quasi-potential Vδ converges to the...

We consider a two-dimensional atomic mass spring system and show that in the small displacement regime the corresponding discrete energies can be related to a continuum Griffith energy functional in the sense of Γ-convergence. We also analyze the continuum problem for a rectangular bar under tensile boundary conditions and find that depending on the boundary loading the minimizers are either ho...

We prove the stability of a large class of unilateral minimality properties which arise naturally in the theory of crack propagation proposed by Francfort and Marigo in [22]. Then we give an application to the quasistatic evolution of cracks in composite materials.